Nature

I haven't been reading much in the past several weeks, mostly because my time has been primarily consumed by creating and editing videos, but I recently started reading Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and it's just the kind of gem I need at a time like this. I feel ashamed for not having read Emerson sooner. Here's an excerpt:

A nobler want of man is served by nature, namely, the love of Beauty.

The ancient Greeks called the world κόσμος, beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or such the plastic power of the human eye, that the primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, the animal, give us a delight in and for themselves; a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By the mutual action of its structure and of the laws of light, perspective is produced, which integrates every mass of objects, of what character soever, into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the landscape which they compose, is round and symmetrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful. And the stimulus it affords the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has its own beauty. But besides this general grace diffused over nature, almost all the individual forms are agreeable to the eye, as is proved by our endless imitations of some of them, as the acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion's claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, as the palm.

His prose is clean and evokes fluid imagery. Sometimes it becomes a puzzle to decipher, which is fine with me. Learning never was fun without a challenge. When he talks about light, I'm reminded of my acute sensitivity to bright light. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I sneeze from light overload. Prime examples would include, but are not limited to, breaching bright daylight from a poorly lit building, walking past white buildings in broad sunlight, heavy fluorescent lighting in retail or grocery stores, or even just a very bright object in a dark setting. This peculiarity is less irritating than it might sound, though I could imagine a slightly worse version of myself walking around sneezing at every corner. If anything, I use this to my advantage to get sneezes out of that funky limbo. If a sneeze is hangin', I will automatically look toward the brightest object in the room or sky to force the sneeze (in fact, white overcast is another beast my eyes are allergic to). It works every time.